FAIRLEA, W.Va. — It’s hard to find good help down on the farm, according the President of the American Farm Bureau. Zippy Duvall was in West Virginia Thursday, taking a tour of the State Fair of West Virginia and discussing the issues facing American growers today.
Speaking on MetroNews Talkline, Duvall said without question the lack of adequate labor is the number one problem facing the American farmer.
“A lot of our farmers say that’s the only thing that keeps them from growing their business,” Duvall explained. “They have the land in a lot of cases, they have the water, but they can’t find the labor to help them actually get the work done.”
The problem isn’t isolated to any one part of the nation. As fewer and fewer Americans are being raised in the rural setting, the idea of farm work, particularly some of the more menial tasks, is falling out of favor.
“We’re in a time in our history where many Americans don’t want to do the work on the farm,” Duvall explained. “We try really hard to hire local people, but not many want to do that kind of work.”
The labor crunch is showing few signs of improvement. Duvall and his allies are attempting to work through the strong push for immigration reform which threatens to severely cut the supply of workers from other countries who are willing to come to the United States to handle the tasks. It puts America’s food supply at a crossroads which Duvall doesn’t believe is the choice most Americans want.
“We’re really at a time in history where the American people have got to make up their mind,” he said. “Will they let us grow their food here in American and let us bring in workers to do the work or are we going to buy our food from outside our country.”
Duvall added the Farm Bureau is involved in immigration reform in hopes of creating a policy which not only allows foreign workers, but simplifies the process of hiring them since few small operators have the means to afford attorneys to navigate mountains of red tape.
Beyond the labor shortage, the second greatest concern to the Farm Bureau is overbearing enforcement of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other federal regulatory enforcement by the US EPA. In some cases, according to Duvall, some farmers were blocked from plowing their fields by obscure regulations in recent years and spent much of their life savings trying to battle the enforcement actions.